Babcock & Wilcox (B&W) will slash its spending on the mPower small modular reactor (SMR) project, having failed to find customers or investors.

B&W’s mPower design was prioritised for deployment under a five-year cost-matching agreement with the US Department of Energy (DoE), and with the Tennessee Valley Authority named as the lead customer. The three of them supplied a budget of $150 million per year to develop mPower, hoping to build the first unit by 2022.

Westinghouse made a similar decision earlier this year:

In February this year Westinghouse announced it would scale back its development of its 225 MWe small modular reactor design, having lost out in the DoE competition.

The cutbacks by Babcock & Wilcox and Westinghouse leave the NuScale small modular reactor as the only design being pursued in the United States. Argentina, China and Russia are still exploring SMR development.

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About Robert Singleton

By day, I work for a call center. In my spare time, I try to save my hometown (and planet) from a nearly constant onslaught of greedheads, lunatics and land developers. I live in a fictional town called Austin, Texas, where I go to way too many meetings.